New information from the United States Public Health Service throws fresh light on sex education – specifically on continuing efforts to rely exclusively on encouraging sexual abstinence.

It turns out that premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans. A study published in the February 2007 issue of Public Health Reports, the official journal of the Public Health Service, found that 95 percent of Americans have had sex before marriage. It found, moreover, that even among those who abstain from sex until age 20 or older, 81 percent eventually have premarital sex. It also refuted the notion that premarital sex is something new: Even among women who were born in the 1940s, nearly 9 in 10 had sex before marriage.

Another recent report, from a government-ordered evaluation of federally funded abstinence-only education programs such as one operating in some private schools in Maine, found that these programs have no impact on the sexual behavior of youth. The study, by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., of Princeton, N.J., concluded that teenagers who had completed abstinence-only programs were no more likely to abstain from sex than those not in the program, that they had the same number of sex partners, started having sex at the same average age, and were no less likely to engage in unprotected sex.

These findings are a powerful justification for Maine’s statewide public school use of Family Life Education curricula. They advocate abstinence but also focus on healthy relationships, good decision-making and scientifically accurate information about how young people can protect themselves against unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease.

The findings also show that the Bush administration’s insistence on abstinence-unless-married education ignores reality. But a struggle goes on between, on the one hand, the Family Planning Association of Maine and educators and parents who agree with it, and, on the other hand, an organization that now calls itself Maine Character Resource. The latter group has received federal grants to conduct “community-based abstinence education” and has already gained access to one public school in Maine.

Abstinence-only-until-marriage education has been subsidized by the federal government since l996, under a provision of the amended Social Security Act. The legislation provided for the distribution of $50 million a year to states that chose to participate. They have had to match every four federal dollars with three state dollars. The combined total has come to $787.5 million for the eight years from 1998 through 2006. Programs that receive the funding are prohibited from discussing methods of contraception, including condoms, except to report failure rates.

That’s a lot of money for a program that doesn’t work.